Working Session: En/gendering Violence in Oceania
Organizers:  Dorothy Counts and Christine Stewart

Our session continues its organic process of development, with some participants dropping out and others joining. Our original plans to proceed to symposium this year were thwarted by the many other commitments of participants during the past year, meaning that work has not progressed as hoped. Nevertheless, we were presented with an exciting range of papers this year: some advanced, some still in draft stage. All dealt with gender violence in Papua New Guinea, meaning that we will have to reconsider our session title. We are now more determined than ever to proceed to publication.

We had already learned that one of the sources of violence in the rapidly changing societies of PNG is the stress put on male identity formation, a stress that often finds its outlet in violent behavior, and dubbed it "troubled masculinities." Our papers deal with some newly emergent and quite exciting issues surrounding gender violence, such as the influences of Christianity, the introduced legal system, economic development and donor aid, mythical origins, the gendering of witch-killing, and the cultural perceptions which legitimize some forms of gender violence. This year, we spent a large part of the day discussing the papers of those present, and noted two new papers from participants unable to attend. Our session this year concluded with a summary of themes we could see emerging, which gave rise to these stresses. These themes included:

• The disempowerment and empowerment of women, the threats posed by empowerment, and the means adopted to retaliate to this threat
  
  
• Tradition, modernity, and societies in transition
  
  
• Economic factors and the way they operate to increase/diminish the propensity for gender violence.

Dorothy Counts, 15130 Old Mission Rd, Oyama, BC V4V 2A9 CANADA; <countsd@cablelan.net>